Regina de Miguel

Regina de Miguel

Proliferación quimérica, 2024

Acrylic on plywood panel

200 x 150 x 2.6 cm

TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection

Regina de Miguel’s works are inhabited by multispecies holobionts—composite beings that fuse an array of organic and symbolic elements: the nervous system of a squid, corals, fungal structures, flowers, insects, ceramics, masks, necklaces, and cosmic imagery. These vitalist organisms and artifacts resonate with the theories of biologist Lynn Margulis, who defined holobionts as assemblages of multiple species coexisting in ecological systems, often through symbiosis or cooperation. This concept foregrounds the deep interconnectedness of all matter—organic and inorganic, human and more-than-human.

In this painting, microbial and human agencies are intricately entwined, forming vitalist totems that express radical interdependence. De Miguel’s compositions dissolve the boundaries between the natural and the human, between matter and myth, revealing the complex entanglements that constitute all forms of life.

The work is part of a larger body of paintings and watercolors emerging from a work of eco-science fiction the artist wrote in 2020. Set in a speculative future where space has been colonized by humans, the narrative follows a biologist investigating alien archaeology on a planet called Exile. Living beside a swamp, she paints and records the mutant lifeforms that surround her. This mythopoetic wetland shifts between a site of coexistence and multiplicity—where nostalgia and loss haunt the air—and a porous interface for communicating with comets, summoning gatherings of the suicidal, and studying hybrids of birds and insects, along with the planet’s mutant plant species. Chimeras, and more chimeras.

De Miguel’s chimeric beings echo the feminist speculative thought of Donna Haraway, particularly her call to “make kin, not babies”—to recognize and cultivate multispecies alliances in the face of planetary crisis. The holobiont mantis does not signify monstrosity or violence, but becomes a figure of coexistence: a patchwork body woven from extremophile and more-than-human fragments, testifying to the porousness of species boundaries and the need for solidarity beyond the human. This is not a return to a lost nature, but a forward-facing kinship forged through entanglement, survival, and the reimagining of what it means to live and relate.

In subverting the patriarchal figure of the femme fatale, De Miguel’s mantis reclaims her not as an object of fear or seduction, but as a feminist emblem of defiance—one that confronts the unknown without resolving it, that thrives within the chaos of the ungraspable. Among the wicked, the worst—yet in that wickedness lies an ethics of relation, transformation, and resistance.